Uniform + Bad Breeding

UNIFORM

Uniform wants to find what’s underneath. And what’s underneath the underneath. And what’s under that.

Uniform announce their fifth solo album, American Standard, today, to be released on 23rd August via Sacred Bones. American Standard is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new.

Underneath it all, what remains is trust. A record of this range and depth, a piece of art so far out on a ledge, can only be attempted with an extreme and almost foolish amount of understanding between collaborators. American Standard stands firmly on the bedrock that Uniform’s two original members, Michael Berdan and Ben Greenberg, have been building on for over a decade.

For an album to defy simple genre exercises and become a work of art, the musicians behind it must push themselves so far beyond the frayed ends of an established comfort zone that they might never return. Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonising in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.

BAD BREEDING

Hailing from Stevenage, England, the first new town to be declared under the 1946 New Town Act, Bad Breeding are an anarcho-punk four-piece delivering punishing blasts of ferocious noise that draws influence from the original British pioneers of the scene; Crass, Rudimentary Peni, and Flux of Pink Indians. More than perhaps any other contemporary punk band, Bad Breeding seem preternaturally able to make music that sounds the way it feels to live in today’s world. After almost a decade’s worth of work, they offer no easy diatribes about the failures of neoliberalism, the war on the working class, and the unfolding horror of climate change. Instead, in complex layers of sound and structure, Bad Breeding projects a viable path forward: envisioning a future unfettered by the state and finding power in community, solidarity and worker-led organisation.